Romero and Grande: Companions on the Journey by Ana María Pineda (review)

Oscar Romero and Rutilio Grande are two prominent martyrs of the Salvadorian Catholic Church who are often associated with the theology of liberation. Although born a generation apart, they led intertwined lives. As Sister Ana María Pineda of Santa Clara University reports in the present monograph, they were both from small towns in rural El Salvador, entered the priesthood, and met an untimely death while witnessing to their understanding of the gospel's preferential option for the poor. Romero, who rose to be Archbishop of San Salvador, is undoubtedly the more well known of the pair and was beatified in 2015 by Pope Francis. Notwithstanding, on that occasion, it was asserted by Archbishop Paglia that it is impossible to know Romero without knowing Grande.

Analyzing the life stories of both men more carefully in light of their overlapping concerns and contexts, Romero and Grande exposes the fact that their lives were replete with human flaws, and, in Romero's case especially, neither the spirit of solidarity associated with the theology of liberation nor an air of saintly greatness was always at the forefront. Yet in telling their human stories, she brings these figures down to earth and effectively supports the premise that the social justice principles that both men took a stand for at the time of their deaths can be supported by ordinary and similarly flawed people. Hence, the framing of Pineda's subtitle: it was a journey to get to the point where they were martyred for standing in solidarity with those living in poverty within a context of political turmoil in El Salvador. Further, at key points, each helped the other in the style of a companion on that journey.

The portraits that Pineda paints of each figure via an accessible conversation with theological concepts serve to solidify the poignancy of that framing. Although he was the younger of the two Salvadorians and both were in close contact with the reality of rural poverty and the too-frequent harshness of life for campesinos in their childhoods, Pineda shows how Grande was relatively closer to these realities and kept them central to his faith. These commitments were only enhanced as he entered the Society of Jesus after a period training for the priesthood in the national seminary. In this regard, while both men were gifted with academic aptitude and oriented toward charity, Grande was the first to apply his skills and orientations toward praxis-based pastoral work. Pineda discerns a key moment in this regard when the Jesuit began to study new approaches to ministry emerging in the wake of Vatican II's turning to the world, Paul VI's encyclical Populorum Progressio, and the contributions to Catholic social teaching made by CELAM (the regional assembly of Latin American bishops) at Médelin in 1968. A culmination of this formal study was Grande's time in Quito at the IPLA, the Latin American Pastoral Institute. His emerging interest in contextually appropriate pastoral care would eventually see Grande shift from work teaching at the national seminary and as a prefect for discipline at an elite Jesuit school in San Salvador to taking up rural ministry in the parish of Aguilares, which encompassed his hometown. Pineda presents this point of transition in an informative manner buttressed by her research and interviews. She also notes how Grande developed his "own primary and fundamental option" (49) to guide his collaborative approach to pastoral work among the campesinos, one that was oriented toward integral human development. It was when living out this approach in 1977 that Grande and two of his lay companions were gunned down while travelling for a liturgical celebration.

Pineda's analysis concludes that it was this violent death, coming shortly after Romero's appointment as Archbishop of San Salvador, that precipitated a transformation in the elder man. A friend and priest had been killed. Romero's response was marked...